Food, Globalism and Theory: Marxian and Institutionalist Insights Into the Global Food System Charles R.P

University of Miami Law School Institutional Repository University of Miami Inter-American Law Review 10-1-2011 Food, Globalism and Theory: Marxian and Institutionalist Insights into the Global Food System Charles R.P. Pouncy Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.law.miami.edu/umialr Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, and the International Law Commons Recommended Citation Charles R.P. Pouncy, Food, Globalism and Theory: Marxian and Institutionalist Insights into the Global Food System, 43 U. Miami Inter- Am. L. Rev. 89 (2011) Available at: http://repository.law.miami.edu/umialr/vol43/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Miami Inter- American Law Review by an authorized administrator of Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 89 Food, Globalism and Theory: Marxian and Institutionalist Insights into the Global Food System Charles R. P. Pouncy* INTRODUCTION In June 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that world hunger was expected to reach unprecedented highs as more than 100 million additional people were forced into the ranks of the hungry, resulting in 1.02 billion people being undernourished each day.' Although the numbers have moderated somewhat since that time, the first decade of the 21st century has witnessed a steady increase in the number of hungry people. 2 Importantly, the increase in hunger is not a problem of supply. Food production figures are generally strong, and it is largely conceded that there is enough food to feed everyone on the planet.3 Instead, the problem results from the ideologies associated with food distribution. The processes of food production, distribution and consumption have become market processes and as a result, the ability to meet one's nutritional needs is a function * Associate Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law. B.A., Fordham University, 1976; J.D., Cornell Law School, 1979; LL.M., Temple University School of Law, 1995. A version of this paper was presented at the South- North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, The Global Politics of Food: Sustainability and Subordination, May 6-8, 2010 at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and it benefits from the other papers and analyses presented at that conference. I would like to thank the organizers of the conference for creating an opportunity for a meaningful interaction of scholars, practitioners and activists in an effort to better understand and respond to the processes of subordination being perpetrated in this moment in the history of food. The author acknowledges generous research support for this paper from the Florida International University College of Law. 1. 1.02 Billion People Hungry, MEDIA CENTRE, FOOD AND AGRIC. ORG. OF THE UNITED NATIONS, (June 19, 2009), available at http://fao.org/news/story/en/item/ 20568/icode/. 2. Id. 3. "If all food produced in the world were to be divided equally among its inhabitants, every woman, man and child would consume almost 2800 Calories per day, which is 17% more Calories than 30 years ago, despite the fact that the population has grown by 70% over the last 30 years." Jacques Diouf, Dir. Gen., Food and Agric. Org. of the United Nations, Address at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government (Jan. 30, 2003), available at http://www.fao.org/english/dg/ 2003/kennedy3001.htm. 90 INTER-AMERICAN LAW REVIEW [Vol. 43:1 of the ability to pay the price that the globalized food market has established for the commodities we consume as food. This marks a distinct departure from the traditional relation- ship between people and food and has created a new opportunity for the subordination of peoples and societies in both the global South and North by the business and financial interests spearheading these transformations. The instrumentalities deployed are economic policies and processes based on neoclassical economic theory. Neoclassical economics is noteworthy for its reliance on markets to govern the distribution of societal assets, resources and opportunities, and its attempt to convert its value premises, i.e., efficiency, utility, and rationality, from policy choices into social imperatives.' The use of these value premises in the construction of economic policy results in the preservation of the existing distribution of assets, resources and opportunities, where distribution subordinates most of the population of the planet to the interests of those who control the supposedly self- regulating markets. Therefore, if scholars, policy makers, and activists are to aggressively engage the processes of economic subordination being generated by the globalization of food production, they should abandon exclusive reliance on economic orthodoxy, or put another way, the neoclassical paradigm. Critical scholars, policy makers, and activists should instead adopt a heterodox approach to economic analysis, embracing all schools of economic study that pro- vide useful critiques and solutions to the anti-subordination project. In contrast to neoclassical theory and its neoliberal ana- logs, heterodox schools of economics are more sensitive to the lim- 4. The neoclassical economic paradigm represents the effort to transport economic thinking from the realm of philosophy to the realm of science. The fore parents of what would become the neoclassical paradigm sought to uncover the "laws" of economics and restructured the formulas associated with Newtonian physics into models purporting to describe economic processes. See E. RAY CANTERBERY, THE MAING OF EcoNoMics 91-95 (Wadsworth Publishing Co. 1st ed. 1976); see also PHILIP MIROWSKI, MORE LIGHT THAN HEAT: ECONOMICS AS SOCIAL PHYSICS, PHYSICS AS NATURE'S EcoNoMIcs 107-08 (Cambridge Univ. Press 1st ed. 1989). Despite its reliance on highly unreasonable assumptions, its mathematical elegance created the illusion of science, and it became mainstream economics in the United States. Charles R.P. Pouncy, Contemporary Financial Innovation: Orthodoxy and Alternatives, 51 SMU L. REv. 505, 542 (1998). 5. Charles R.P. Pouncy, The Rational Rogue: Neoclassical Ideology in the Regulation of the FinancialProfessional, 26 VT. L. REv. 263, 292 (2002). 6. Charles R.P. Pouncy, Institutional Economics and Critical Race/LatCrit Theory: The Need for a Critical "Raced" Economics, 54 RUTGERS L. REv. 841, 842 (2002). 2011] THE GLOBAL FOOD SYSTEM 91 its of markets and the cycles of instability they generate, as well as the role of history, subordination and inequality in understanding economic relationships and in constructing appropriate economic policies.' This paper constructs a preliminary analysis of the current state of globalized food production, distribution and consumption by applying perspectives originating in Marxian and intuitional economic analyses. Although much of these perspectives are familiar to scholars in the global South they remain something of a black box to U.S. scholars in the legal academy. My goal is to shed light on that box and inspire more heterodox research and analysis of the processes of subordination existing in the food system and elsewhere in the economy. This paper is organized into four parts. Part I examines the recent food crisis and its underpinnings in the structure of the food system. Part II describes food regime theory and links it to contemporary changes in the way food is produced, distributed and consumed globally. Part III describes the structure of institutional processes and their significance to understanding the global food system. Part IV concludes with a discussion of the counter- movement to the status quo of food distribution, the response of people who have been affected by the corporate intrusion into tra- ditions of food and their future. PART I - FOOD CRISIS Recent years have seen the eruption of a number of crises associated with the processes of corporate and financial globalization.' The food crises of 2007-2009 were dramatic examples of the ways that financial decisions by Northern actors impacted the lives of people living in Southern economies.' Although corn pro- 7. The limits of neoclassical economic theory are increasingly recognized in the legal academy. See, e.g., Athena D. Mutua, Introducing Class Crits: From Class Blindness to a CriticalLegal Analysis of Economic Inequality, 56 BuFF. L. REV. 859 (2008). 8. They include: ". .the financial and 'real economy' crises, growing unemployment and poverty crises; food supply/price crises and related hunger and health crises; energy and other resources extractions and environmental damages. Ecological destructions, climate change and 'natural' disasters. ." DOT KEET, TRANSNAT'L INST., "THE CRISIS" AND THE CRISES OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM: CHALLENGES FOR, AND ALTERNATIVES FROM, "THE SouH" 2 (2010), available at http://www.tni.org/ paper/global-capitalism-challenges-and-alternatives-south. Globalization has linked the economies of the North and South so the financial crises appearing in the "advanced" economies have increasingly severe consequences in "developing" economies. Id. 9. Nonetheless, 2006-2008 saw escalating food insecurity for children in the United States. See John Cook and Karen Jeng, Childhood Food Insecurity: the 92 INTER-AMERICAN LAW REVIEW [Vol. 43:1 duction has trended upward since 1961, in 2004 the demand for "renewable" energy sources changed the components of corn usage dramatically.

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